The hosts of “The View” were largely disgusted by video footage showing FBI director Kash Patel partying with the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team in Milan this weekend, but Whoopi Goldberg offered a more “positive” spin on it. The ABC moderator suggested that maybe the FBI told Patel to go, simply to get him out of the way.
In the footage, Patel is seen celebrating in the locker room with the victorious U.S. team on Sunday, yelling and drinking. But, a spokesperson for the FBI insisted Patel was in Milan on official business, and that’s why he used a taxpayer-funded plane to get there. His trip to the Olympics just happened to coincide.
“Maybe the folks in the FBI said ‘Yeah Kash, go do that,’ so they don’t have to deal with him,” Whoopi suggested on Monday. “Because they know he doesn’t know what he’s doing. They know that he is incompetent, they know he’s just — he’s a joke. And he’s a joke to the rest of the world, and because, for most of the people working in the FBI, it is not a joke, they’re the ones whose eyes are on the ball.”
Meanwhile, the rest of the women at the table weren’t so optimistic. Host Ana Navarro was quick to remind viewers that Patel has been accused of misusing the FBI plane before, and that he wasn’t the only one.
“The bottom line is these people have no care about wasting taxpayer money, and they behave — I don’t even know what Kash Patel was doing there,” she said.
Beyond the use of taxpayer money, the optics of Patel’s trip bothered host Sara Haines more, considering how many things are going on in this country.
“Right now, the world doesn’t feel settled or stable, and you’ve got the head of the FBI, and the visual of chugging a beer in a locker room,” she said. “I just think it doesn’t — he’s already under scrutiny for a thousand reasons, because this administration has not been the defining of competence.”
“So I think when you have someone like that, with all that’s going on, and then that’s what you see, I just think it’s a bit of an insult to the American people,” Haines continued.
Haines lamented that she misses the days when FBI directors weren’t so prominent, which prompted guest host Amanda Carpenter to explain why that was the case and precisely why she was so bothered by the footage as well.
“The reason we don’t see them is because they’re usually busy,” she said. “There’s a lot of things to do. And god forbid something happens, and it could’ve been prevented, and it wasn’t because he was concerned about hanging around in the men’s hockey locker room.”
“The View” airs weekdays at 11 a.m. ET on ABC.
